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Appeared on: Monday, April 13, 2009
DVD Burning at 22x

1. About the test

When we tested the first 20x DVD burners last year we thought that the specific speed was way too high for reliable DVD recording. However, the 20x DVD drives appeared on the market and soon after them, some ODD makers pushed the speeds even higher with the release of the first 22x drives. Samsung, HLDS, LiteOn and Sony Optiarc were among them, with the latter to prepare for the release of an even faster burner that will offer recording at a blazing speed of 24x!

We have been always concerned about the quality of the recordings at the maximum available speed. The 22x speed speed is very high and controlling the burning procedure in order to maintain acceptable writing quality requires not only sufficient firmware engineering and drive design, but also discs that react well in the burning process itself and store data accurately. This means that in these discs should perform perfectly in beyond their their limits. Of course, ODD makers are aware of the strict requirements for 22x burning so they support this high speed using specific media only.

In this brief article we provide information about the way three of the latest 22x High Speed ReWriters perform when they burn compatible DVD recordable discs at 22x. These drives are the LG GH22NS30, the Samsung SH-S223F and the LiteOn iHAS422.

All the drives have been already presented through CDRInfo.com in the previous months, but for today's test we have updated their firmware to the latest available.

The correctable PISum8 errors here exceed the acceptable limits (280) and unfortunately they were also reported as POF. These were reported in the outer part of the data area, where the burning speed was higher than 20x. Jitter was also out of specs after the 49mm radius of the disc.

Although the Samsung drive did not burn the specific disc at 22x, we included the results in order to show that sometimes it's better to limit the recording speed to get better quality. The Samsung drive behaved pretty well here and almost all the measured signals were within limits.

An excellent burn here with the Samsung drive with the MCC03RG20 DVD-R disc at 18x.

6. Summary

In the following table, we have summed up the results of our tests. Green cells indicate a good burn, where the red ones indicate a bad one (PISum8 >280 or POF). The orange cells indicate discs that PISum8 error rate was slightly higher than the limits, and no POF were reported.

We remind you that the discs in the table below were recorded at the maximum supported speed.

HL-DT-ST GH22NS30 v1.02

LITEON iHAS422 v4L11

TSST SH-S223F vSB03

Taiyo Yuden YUDEN000 T03 000 (00h) DVD+R

Bad burn @22x

Good burn @22x

Excellent Burn @22x

Verbatim MCC 004 000 (00h) DVD+R

Average Burn @22x

Bad burn @16x

Excellent burn @20x

Taiyo Yuden TYG03 DVD-R

Bad Burn @22x

Bad Burn @16x

Average Burn @22x

Verbatim MCC 03RG20 DVD-R

Bad burn @22x

Good burn @16x

Excellent burn @18x

It is obvious that the Taiyo Yuden T03 DVD+R disc should be your choice if you decide to use the 22x burning speed. The disc was reliably recorded using the LiteOn and the Samsung drives and it seems to offer the wider compatibility among the burners of the test for 22x.

Surprisingly, the Yuden TYG03 DVD-R disc did not perform so well. The burn with the TSST drive was average with the PISum8 errors to slightly exceed the limits, while the rest of the drives did not manage to offer high quality recordings, even at speeds lower than the 22x.

The MCC004 DVD+R and MCC03RG20 DVD-R discs are also reliable at least in slower speeds (16x, 18x, 20x).

The LG GH22NS30 burner will burn your discs at 22x but the result is questionable. LiteOn's solution seems to be optimized to use the Yuden T03 DVD+R for 22x only. Finally, the Samsung S223F was the best performer here and will wisely decide to use the optimal burning speed according to the inserted disc.

We should also note here that all the discs in this test were fully readable. The red color indicates that the specific disc could be more vulnerable since the error rates reported were already high right after the burning procedure. This could mean that the specific discs could become unreadable earlier than the rest after some years, provided that the discs are treated and stored under the same conditions.

In the following weeks we will have the chance to see more results with discs recorded at 24x.